Some of you may have heard of Luminosity, the San Francisco based company that claimed to increase cognitive brain functions in concentration, memory, and problem solving. When I first heard about it, I was not so much interested in the benefits, but rather because of this one game, “Penguin Pursuit.” The concept of competing with CPU to navigate through the maze while the table rotates left and right appealed to my inner competitiveness.

The trial version consisted of three randomly chosen games, but because I wanted to keep playing Penguin Pursuit beat my own score, I registered for the yearly plan. It was a pretty rash move because it felt like a gym membership that you pay to guilt trip yourself.

With the plan, I had full access to the games as well as a profile analysis, but I stuck with the daily 5 games and focused on that Penguin game. My score increased with time, but I am not sure whether it was due to increase in cognitive function or just merely becoming more familiar with the game. The results seemed to be promising, but I do have my doubts. I’ll show a glimpse of the “analysis” that the website provides.

The scores are based on Brain Performance Index (BPI), and after I’ve reached a certain point, the scores stalled, which is kind of depressing.

Lastly, the site keeps track of your training history for overall BPI and BPI of individual functions. You can see my memory deteriorated for some weird reason in the past 4 weeks and I have not been able to work back up. I am secretly convinced the games exhausted my brain.

Even if the games do not increase cognitive functions, spending 5 minutes out of a day will do you no harm. I shall keep trying to outrun that other penguin.